Monopoly: fun for all the family. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In days gone by, Christmas meant enough roast turkey dinner to ballast a clipper followed by a gathering round the flickering cathode ray tube to watch the special, half-the-ITV-annual-programming-budget Christmas film at 2pm. We kids sat mesmerised and silent, our parents fell asleep and Nanny just carried on having a series of small strokes and farting contentedly in the corner.
Now, people tell me, families scatter to the four winds as soon as the meal is over. There are no special, feverishly anticipated films to be hoarded against the coming festivities. Viewing habits and the instant, multi-form accessibility of every release during the year means that no channel has anything to offer that half the family hasn't bought, downloaded, pirated, watched, re-watched and discarded long before December. Families have a plasma screen in every room and an array of box sets for every taste. Children can watch MTV till their eyeballs pop, parents can sleep through the second series of The Sopranos and flatulent ancients can parp along to Goodbye Mr Chips from the Robert Donat highlights collection.
So far, however, those trapped for the holidays at Mangan Towers have resisted this temptation. In fact, we have not so much failed to embrace technology as actively taken a step in the opposite direction. We have, in short, started getting the Monopoly board out instead.
We used to be happy slumped in front of the TV en masse, pretending that having the same programme fed to us by a benevolent TV controller at the same time amounted to a quality communal experience. But now even deliberately choosing to watch the same DVD somehow breaks the illusion. And watching things separately would require a wholesale re-writing of the seasonal provisions in our family constitution.
So, we have had to turn to genuine communal experiences instead. Board games it is. In our house, entertainment industry fragmentation has brought unity - at least until someone lands twice on a behotelled Mayfair. Then, I am afraid, we are as far from disseminating peace and goodwill to all men as ever we were.
